Wes Whitby

Wes Whitby is the Programs Coordinator for Treehouse Museum, Ogden's children's museum, and has been affiliated with Treehouse since 1992 after moving to Ogden in the year the museum opened. He came to Ogden specifically to study musical theater, vocal jazz, and writing at Weber State University and discovered and fell in love with both Ogden and Treehouse immediately and unexpectedly.

After receiving a degree in English with a minor in Theater Arts, Wes spent three semesters in Russia teaching English and Theater to children at the Kozarnovsky Class Centre for the Performing Arts in Moscow, and in the elementary school system in Voronezh. Upon returning to Utah in late 2000, Wes returned to Treehouse to take the position of Programs Coordinator for the museum, overseeing and organizing the museum's family literacy programs and engaging in the museum's unique brand of improvisational theater, the "ParticiPlay," with the over 24,000 students who attend the museum each year on school tours and the over 150,000 yearly visitors to the museum, making sure each child gets to "Step into a Story."

He also coordinates the Treehouse Museum's theater outreach program, summer theater camps and workshops, and serves as the artistic director for the museum's acting company, the Treehouse Troupe. Wes was awarded a Masters degree in English from Weber State in 2010 with a children's theater focus and has written and adapted over 60 plays and puppet shows for families over the years.

Wes is a member of the Utah Storytelling Guild and regularly performs his musical brand of storytelling in Ogden and at venues across the region, both alone and in tandem with his wife Emily Peterson Whitby - an instructor of English Composition at Weber State. Wes and Emily live just south of the university, in the unincorporated outskirts of our fair city, with their four creative and precocious children. In 2010 Wes received the Ogden City Mayor's Award for the Arts in the area of Theatre Arts.